Friday, March 27, 2015

NY Times ran a front page article on Wednesday, focused on the tug of war for Hilary
Clinton’s soul, supposedly between the teacher unions and the big donors,
mostly hedge fund operators, who want to privatize public schools and ramp up
high-stakes testing, weaken teacher tenure and base their evaluations on
student test scores. Value-added test based teacher evaluation has proved to be
highly unreliable, and many expert groups, including the American Statistical
Association and the National Academy of Sciences, have concluded that it could
have damaging impact on morale and the quality of education.

In the article, the hedgefunders make it
clear that they will threaten to withhold their contributions if Hillary does not
adopt their positions:

“This is an issue that’s important to a lot
of Democratic donors,” said John Petry, a hedge fund manager who was a founder
of the Harlem Success Academy, a New York charter school. “Donors want
to hear where she stands.”

Yet in the process of writing
about this ideological battle, the reporter, Maggie Haberman, characterizes Democrats for
Education Reform, one of the principle hedge fund-backed lobby groups as a
“left of center group,” which is absurd.
For some reason, DFER has managed to persuade reporters that it has any liberal
credentials, despite the fact that as Diane Ravitch pointed out, the California Democratic Party has repudiated it.

Parents Across America wrote an open letter to the NPR ombudsman in 2011, objecting to the fact that
Claudio Sanchez, the NPR reporter, had called DFER a “liberal”
organization, while quoting their criticism of the progressive participants in
the anti-corporate reform Save Our Schools march in DC.

We also pointed out that DFER’s founder,
hedge fund operator Whitney Tilson, admitted
that the only reason he put “Democrats” in the organization’s title and focused
on convincing Democrats to adopt their pro-privatization agenda was that GOP
leaders were already in agreement with most of their positions. The
following is an excerpt from a film made by Tilson called “A Right Denied”:

“The real problem, politically, was not the Republican party, it was the
Democratic party. So it dawned on us, over the course of six months or a year,
that it had to be an inside job. The main obstacle to education reform was
moving the Democratic party, and it had to be Democrats who did it, it had to
be an inside job. So that was the thesis behind the organization. And the name
– and the name was critical – we get a lot of flack for the name. You know,
“Why are you Democrats for education reform? That’s very exclusionary. I mean,
certainly there are Republicans in favor of education reform.” And we said, “We
agree.” In fact, our natural allies, in many cases, are Republicans on this crusade,
but the problem is not Republicans. We don’t need to convert the Republican
party to our point of view…”

In
addition, by characterizing the struggle on education policy as being a
conflict primarily between the teacher unions and big donors, the reporter misses
the boat. Indeed, the only mention of
parents in the piece implies that they are allied with the DFER privateers: “Reform
proponents include donors, but also a cross section of parents and business
advocates.”

Hopefully NY Times readers and especially
Hillary will smart enough to reject this claim, if they merely looked at
Governor Cuomo’s plunging popularity.
Cuomo’s poll numbers are dropping like a stone, largely because his
positions on education are in thrall to his big donors in the DFER/hedgefund crowd. He has pushed hard on test-based teacher
evaluation and other favorite talking points of the corporate reform
contingent.

According to the latest Quinnipiac poll, Cuomo’s approval ratings on education are
at a tepid 28% - while 63% of voters reject his views on school reform. 65% of voters reject the notion that teacher
tenure should be based on student test scores; 71% reject the idea that teacher
pay should be based on scores, and 55% trust the teacher unions on education, compared
to 28% who trust Cuomo.

And the overwhelming rejection of Cuomo's
views is shared among rural, suburban, urban voters, Republicans and Democrats
alike.

Interestingly, instead of citing any of
the many polls that show voters overwhelmingly reject the corporate reform/hedgefund
education agenda, the NY Times article
uncritically links to a leaked “memo” from Joe Williams of DFER, to “Board members and Major Donors,” citing
polling results that supposedly show that “voters agree with our
policies.”

But in the memo, Williams fails
to reveal the actual questions – or what it might actually mean that 69% of
voters feel that education is on the “wrong track”. After a decade or more of increasingly severe
test-based accountability, many voters are indeed weary of the focus on testing
and test prep, and the disruption and damaging cycle of closing neighborhood schools, and so
reject the DFER agenda that is based on more of the same.

Let’s hope for more accurate and less biased education reporting
from the mainstream media in the future.The tug of war on education is not primarily between liberal reformers and the teachers union – but between the 1% and nearly everyone else.

Wednesday, March 25, 2015

Update from Albany on the
budget negotiations: According to Speaker Carl Heastie, there will be no
deal in the budget on a voucher-like private school tax credit giveaway that could yield huge financial benefits to billionaires and corporations but drain state revenue of $100 million.

Raising the charter cap will likely not be included in budget deal but may be addressed later in the year linked to extension of mayoral control in NYC.

Biggest threat right now: an agreement cooked up by Gov. Cuomo and the GOP-led Senate to create a Commission
to determine how much teacher evaluation and tenure should be linked to
test scores—and to hold up any increase in education funding till then.

You should call your Senator
today but especially if s/he is a Republican – and if not, call the
leaders of the Senate, Senators Skelos and Jeff Klein, to tell them you
will hold them responsible if education funding is delayed and linked to
an undemocratic Commission with the unilateral power to double-down on
high-stakes testing by increasing the link between test scores and
teacher evaluation.

Friday, March 20, 2015

Please help us protect our public schools by send a letter here to your legislators and then signing a petition to Gov. Cuomo, Speaker Heastie, and Majority Leader Skelos Now!

Throughout NY state, parents, students, and teachers have rallied to protect our public schools
from Governor’s Cuomo’s attempt to hold school aid hostage to his
damaging policies to double-down on high-stakes testing, and divert
funding to private schools and charters. Yet the Governor has called
these peaceful protests “a tantrum of special interests,” adding: “Frankly, the louder special interests scream … the more we know we’re right.”

We need to send a message to the Legislature and the Governor
that parents are NOT a special interest. We cannot allow our precious
resources to be siphoned off to allow Cuomo and his billionaire donors
attain their goal of privatizing our public schools.

I
am here to testify in support of the resolution against the Governor’s proposal to expand state receivership of allegedly low-performing public schools.The state has no track record of improving
schools in receivership.When the State
Education Department took control of the Roosevelt school district in 2002, and
ran it for over a decade, there was little or no improvement, as reported in a
Newsday 2013 article:

Albany's
intervention ends Monday, after 11 years and more than $300 million in extra
state spending. The period -- marked by limited scholastic progress and
memorable mistakes by state officials and their appointees -- was the first and
only time the state ever managed a local school system.

"I
can tell you right off the bat that the state Education Department has no
capabilities to run a school district," said Roger Tilles of Great Neck,
who is Long Island's representative to the state Board of Regents. "We
need other alternatives, if we're ever going to turn around other districts
that are really not succeeding."[1]

Moreover, the narrative of a “crisis”
in failing schools that is being used to justify the expansion of state receivership
is manufactured -- to encourage the hostile takeover of public schools. As Michael Petrilli of the Thomas
Fordham Institute, a big supporter of the Common Core standards just wrote:

Some education reformers and media outlets are already using the
results of the new, tougher tests to brand schools as “failing” if most of
their students don’t meet the higher standards. Note, for instance, the Daily News’s special report, “Fight for
their Future,” which leads with the provocative headline “New
York City is rife with underperforming schools, including nearly two-thirds of
students missing state standards.” This line of attack closely resembles
the talking points of Eva Moskowitz and Jeremiah Kettridge of Families for
Excellent Schools, who both promote the notion that in New York, “800,000 kids
can’t read or do math at grade level” and “143,000 kids are trapped in
persistently failing schools.”

These statements are out of bounds, and reformers should say so.
They validate the concerns some educators voiced all along: that we would use
the results of the tougher tests to unfairly label more schools as failures.[2]

The results of the new Common Core
exams are essentially unreliable.They
were designed to find two thirds of students failing, and did so, not just in
New York City but in the rest of the state as well. The reports by Families for
Excellent Schools claiming a “crisis” of failing schools were put out by an
organization that has received considerable funding from hedge funders and Wall
Street financiers, as well as more than $700,000 over the past two years
from the Walton Foundation, an organization that has an aggressive
privatization agenda.[3]The unreliable figures and claims of an
education crisis cited by this organization were echoed in a report from the
Governor’s office that has been described as “sometimes
indistinguishable from the eight reports on struggling schools F.E.S. has sent
reporters since the summer.”[4]Not surprisingly, Cuomo himself has received
huge sums from some of the same pro-privatization hedge funders and financiers.
[5]

Yet Carol Burris, award-winning
principal in the Rockville Centre School District,has shown how
unreliable these figures are, based on cut scores imposed by the state that
purport to show which students will be college and career ready.[6]For example, while only half of the students
in her district were said to be proficient in ELA and Math based upon their
state test scores in grades 3-8, 100% of them graduate with a Regents diploma
and 85% with an advanced designation.Over
92% of the these students not only go to college, but persist and are still
there two years after their high school graduation.

Another such district is Oceanside,
Long Island where 96 percent
of students graduate with a Regents diploma, 58 percent with advanced distinction,
and 92 percent go onto college (70 percent to four year colleges and 22 percent
to a two year colleges). Yet more than two thirds of the district’s 8th
graders were labelled as not making the standards in math, according to the
state’s Common Core exams.[7]

When
Michael Bloomberg was running for re-election in 2009, the state test
scores purported to show that two-third of the city’s students had achieved
grade standards in English, and 82 percent in math.[8]Now the state says only about one third of
them do.Clearly the cut scores were set
for political reasons then and are just as politically motivated now. They were
pre-ordained to fit the ideological goals of those who are intent on dismantling
and privatizing our schools.

A few years ago, Rick Hess, a
conservative commentator at the American Enterprise Institute, revealed the
motives behind the Common Core exams in an eerily prescient column called the Common Core Kool-aid:

First, politicians will actually
embrace the Common Core assessments and then will use them to set cut scores
that suggest huge numbers of suburban schools are failing. Then, parents and
community members who previously liked their schools are going to believe the
assessment results rather than their own lying eyes… Finally, newly convinced that
their schools stink, parents and voters will embrace "reform."
However, most of today's proffered remedies--including test-based teacher
evaluation, efforts to move "effective" teachers to low-income
schools, charter schooling, and school turnarounds--don't have a lot of fans in
the suburbs or speak to the things that suburban parents are most concerned
about….Common Core advocates now evince an eerie confidence that they can scare these voters into embracing the
"reform" agenda. [9]

When Gov. Cuomo was running for
re-election, he acknowledged that the state test scores that children received
were not fair, and thus he promised that they should not be put on their
transcripts. He ran a campaign ad, in which he promised "not to use Common
Core scores for at least five years, and then only if our children are
ready."[10]

If these scores aren’t ready to
be used to judge students, they aren’t adequate to judge our schools or deem
them “failing” either. They are
certainly not reliable enough to ask the State Education Department to take over
our public schools – which has had NO record of success in doing so.

Monday, March 16, 2015

On Saturday night the news exploded through the Twittersphere via Bob Braun’s blog that Pearson was monitoring student social media.Pearson had sent a warning to the NJ State Education Department, who in turn had contacted the Superintendent of Warren, saying that a student enrolled in the district had posted a picture of one of the PARCC questions on Twitter during the exam.

That turned out to be incorrect, according to the Superintendent.Apparently, the student had just commented on the question after taking the test, and deleted his tweet after being contacted by the district.The most disturbing aspect of the incident was not merely Pearson’s error in reporting this to the State Education Department, (how did they get this wrong?) but also their suggestion that the student should be disciplined for this behavior – when it’s not at all clear that he did anything wrong.But parents and others were understandably alarmed that Pearson is monitoring student social media at all.

I don’t mean to minimize the creepiness of this, but I am not surprised.Clearly, Pearson has good reasonto defend against its test items being disclosed in advance of students elsewhere taking the PARCC exams, and will use whatever tools at its disposal to do so.But it is somewhat implausible that anyone could imagine that they will be able to achieve this. Given the widespread use of social media and the speed and ease of communication, it is near crazy to imagine that questions given to over five million students in 11 states over the period of several weeks will remain secret for any length of time – or even just during the testing window. According to the PARCC website, since February 16, over two million students have now taken these examsin Arkansas, the District of Columbia, Colorado, Illinois, Ohio, Maryland, Mississippi, New Jersey and New Mexico, with Louisiana, Massachusetts and Rhode Island to start testing soon.

The PARCC/Pearson consortium has also said they refuse to release all of the questions on these exams, a position that is difficult to justify for any assessments in which the stakes for students, teachers and schools are so high.But then those in power always want to maintain maximum secrecy for themselves, and protect what they see is their own privacy rights, whether personal or commercial – while having little or no respect for the privacy of others.Witness how technology CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg maximize their own privacy by asking all their employees and household contractors to sign non-disclosure agreements, while making billions from exploiting the personal information of their customers.

See how Hillary Clinton has kept her State Department emails on a private server, and NYS officials have apparently been in in the habit of destroying their official emails after three months.The NSA has refused to disclose how they have been sweeping up the public’s private emails and conversations for years. What should be public is kept private, and vice versa, because information is power – and the less information corporations and governmental officials provide about their own behavior, and the more they gather up about the actions of ordinary people, the more power they can maintain over the rest of us.

For many years, Pearson has had good reason to try to protect the contents of its exams that transcend security. The corporation has a terrible record of producing highly flawed exams– and by refusing to release them they have not only saved money by being able to recycle faulty questions over again, but they have also been able to shield the shoddy quality of their product. By closely monitoring social media and chatter they can attempt to suppress any discussion or debate of these questions – which may have occurred in this instance – they are also likely protecting not just the actual content of their exams, but their reputation as well.

In 2012, we first found out about the ridiculously flawed Pineapple items from a comment on our blog on the same afternoon the ELA exams were given in NY State.A commenter wrote: “Apparently the New York State 8th Graders thought the story about "The Hare and the Pineapple" was so ridiculous that they have started a Facebook page about it.(I later found out the FB page was started in 2010.) 8th Graders from across NY State are weighing in with comments.”Someone else posted the link to a website from 2007 (now defunct) that had a facsimile of the passage and the questions, while questioning the rationality of anyone who would put these questions on an important exam.

I was lucky enough to have an 8th grader living in my home who could confirm that a very confusing passage about a race between a Pineapple and a Hare was on his exam. You can see the actual text and the questions here. Then in a manner of minutes, I discovered not only found a facsimile of the passage and the questions, but that the same itemshad been included in Pearson exams in numerous other states over seven years, causing huge confusion each time.

Literally, hundreds of thousands of students had been subjected to this reading passage and questions, and many had become understandably upset.Yet that hadn’t stopped Pearson from re-using the questions over and over.It was only because reporters read my blog and the Daily News carried the story the next day that the story became viral and broke into the national media – and the NYS Education Commissioner was finally forced to pull the Pineapple questions out of the exam once and for all.

At that point, Pearson was prevented from reusing these defective passages and subjecting thousands more students to having their achievement scores and transcripts affected by the results.

The memo really has to be read to be believed – full of gobbledegook that sounds as though it comes from a Monty Python skit or an Ionesco play.The author of the memo, Jon S. Twing, (who is still amazingly Executive Vice President & Chief Measurement Officer at Pearson) confirmed that these items had been used since 2004 in six other states and three large districts, and then made the most indefensible claim of all, given the ubiquity online of complaints from students, parents and teachers: “Until the events of this past week, we did not have any prior knowledge that the passage entitled “The Hare and the Pineapple” had any controversy associated with it from any prior use.”

In reality, Pearson has been continuously plagued with scandal through faulty tests, scoring errors and the like for over a decade.If there were any accountability for corporations – instead of for the students and teachers who are judged on the results – the company would have lost all its contracts in recent years rather than awarded the biggest one ever – the PARCC contract, worth billions.

Which is a rather long-winded way to explain that Pearson has good reasons to monitor social media, to suppress not just the specific content of PARCC exams but also any discussion of their substandard quality.

What has also been ignored in the commentary about Pearson’s monitoring of students so far are the extremely porous privacy policies of PARCC/Pearson, including how they claim their right to collect, share and use student data for many purposes:

to analyze test results to assist member states and their local education agencies for purposes of accountability, including promotion and graduation decisions for individual students; teacher and school leader evaluations; school accountability determinations; determinations of principal and teacher professional development and support needs; and teaching, learning, and program improvement; and

to carry out studies designed to improve instruction on behalf of participating states and their local education agencies, pursuant to separate agreements with the member states and/or their local education agencies.

In essence, PARCC and its major subcontractor, Pearson, can hand off the personally identifiable information it has gathered directly from students or that schools have provided them to an unlimited number of third parties, or use it themselves for a wide variety of purposes, as long as the state or district allows.This includes decisions about whether a student should be held back, how a teacher should be evaluated, or a school should be rated.Huge amounts of personal student data can also be handed off to researchers or think tanks or anyone doing a “study,” with no security or privacy restrictions, and without parental notification or consent required – as long it is for the vaguely defined purpose of “improving instruction.”

The other major testing consortium, Smarter Balanced, has no publicly available privacy policy at all – though parents in several states have asked for it without success.

What information do these companies have about your child through PARCC or its other exams?This may differ from state to state, but concerned parents and privacy advocates in Colorado asked their state this specific question, as their students started taking the PARCC last week and will again later in the year.

According to the briefing given by the Colorado State Education department last week, Pearson/PARCC has been supplied with a wealth of personal data, including students’ race/ethnicity, economic status, 504 plan (health conditions that can impact student performance, like allergies or epilepsy), whether they have migrant or immigrant status, disabilities, homelessness, language proficiency, how long they have lived in the state or attended school in the district,and whether they have ever been expelled.All of this is quite disturbing and is similar to what we discovered about inBloom.

In addition, Pearson/PARCC has access to if a student is using testing modifications, along with their names, unique identifier numbers, etc. Beyond sensitive student information, Pearson also collects everything a student types into the keyboard during the test including words or sentences that were typed and then deleted. Pearson knows whether or not the student views a test item, how long it takes him/her to answer a specific question, and it tracks the student's clicks as he/she navigates the test. This seemingly harmless data, when paired with sensitive information about an individual student, creates a very complex learning and behavioral profile of the child.

So this is yet another reason to opt your child out of these standardized exams – which every parent should seriously consider. Both Utah and California specifically give parents to opt out of standardized tests if they so choose. So does the NYC Department of Education, writing: “If, after

consulting with the principal, the parents still want to opt their child out of the exams, the principal should respect the parents' decision and let them know that the school will work to the best of their ability to provide the child.”

.

Also contrary to what you may have read or heard, schools cannot have their funding cut, even if large numbers of students opt out – there is simply no provision in state or federal law for this to happen.The “worst” that can happen is the federal government might restrict a school’s flexibility with use of Title One funds, including requiring more tutoring, which many parents might actually prefer.(For more on this, see FairTest).

As a matter of fact, more than 60,000 students opted out of the NY state exams last year, and nothing happened to these schools. In a statewide survey of NY districts, more than 35 percent of superintendents estimated test refusals last year at 5 percent of students or more, and 23 percent reported student refusals at 10 percent or more.Fully eight percent of superintendents estimated that more than 20 percent of their students in grades 3-8 refused to participate in at least one of the state Common Core exams. Not a single NY school or district has faced ANY consequences as a result.

It would be great to see those numbers grow yet larger again this year.

Opt out and deny them your child’s personal and test score data. Opt out and save your child from the stress of what are unpiloted, and likely flawed exams. Opt out and deny the authorities the ability to use your children’s data in unfair and punitive way, to hurt them, their teachers or their schools.Opt out to fight for an end to the mechanistic depersonalized insanity that is devouring public education.Opt out to fight back against the privateers’ attempt to prove that public schools are failing, in order to benefit the interests of the hedge funders, the ed tech companies and the testing companies. Opt out!

[Event] Protect Our Schools on Saturday March 28, 2015 at 12 PM!

Our public schools are under attack. We ask that you join with us in a citywide event on Saturday March 28 at 12:00 pm in front of the Governor's office, 633 Third Ave., at 41 St. Find more information and a flyer in English and Spanish here, Protect Our Schools!

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Parents and teachers, please let us know what your children's class sizes are this year by filling out our Class Size Survey- 2014

About this blog

This blog is edited by Leonie Haimson, the Executive Director of Class Size Matters and who was a NYC public school parent for 15 years. If you'd like to write for the blog, please email us.

New report on crisis in school overcrowding

Click image for report

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Ask the President & Congress to send Race to the Top over the cliff, instead of our kids!

Please sign our petition now, urging the President and Congress to raise taxes on the wealthy and cut Race to the Top and other damaging competitive grants rather than critical education funding like Title I!

News, commentary and humor about NYC public schools, written by NYC public school parents.

Warning: anything labeled GBN or Gadfly news is parody, although at this rate, it might be news tomorrow!